


if i bleed, you'll be the last to know

by mattwatson



Category: Video Blogging RPF, supermega
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Confessions, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Unrequited Love, its their first time fucking, smut with angst, surprise! second chapter, tw: ryan magee sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:35:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23972335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattwatson/pseuds/mattwatson
Summary: Ryan’s chest aches. He can’t do this. He can’t just lie in bed with Matt and let himself pretend that this could actually become their new normal, let himself think that he could just slip his hand into Matt’s right this second and that it wouldn’t have catastrophic consequences on both of their lives.
Relationships: Ryan Magee/Matt Watson
Comments: 22
Kudos: 123





	1. no rules in breakable heaven

There’s a flush splayed out across Matt’s entire body, the redness hot underneath Ryan’s hands and burning into his vision of Matt’s back. Ryan presses his fingers as deep as they’ll go and revels in how it makes Matt shudder with delight. He leans over Matt, kisses the space between his shoulder blades.

“You’re gorgeous.” He says without thinking, and Matt laughs shakily, arching into Ryan’s body.

“You’re horny.”

Ryan’s heart pounds in dirty betrayal of his demeanour, and he pulls away, grips Matt by the hips again and wills that to be the only reason he’s in this bed with him tonight.

“Says the guy with my fingers in his asshole.”

He meant it as a joke, but he hears Matt’s breathing get heavier and knows he wants to get on with it as much as Ryan does. He scissors his fingers one more time before pulling them out slowly, Matt’s soft whine like absolute fucking music to his ears. Matt lowers himself onto his forearms, sticking his ass further up in the process and Ryan’s so hard he swears he could come just putting on the condom.

(He doesn’t, thankfully.)

Ryan lines himself up with Matt’s hole, tries not to let the way Matt gasps as his cock touches Matt’s entrance make him any dizzier than he already feels. Matt’s body is trembling beneath him in anticipation, his head dipping down.

It all becomes a beautiful blur as Ryan bottoms out inside of Matt, feels breath choked out of him as Matt arches his back up against Ryan’s chest. He can’t help but press his face into Matt’s neck; it feels wrong, somehow, like it’ll betray him, like it's an action that's far too gentle and loving for this situation and Matt will suddenly bolt out of the bed and realise what Ryan’s been wanting all along - but it’s the only chance he has to do it, after all. So he does.

Matt’s babbling as Ryan thrusts into him, oblivious to how much Ryan’s heart is soaring and shattering simultaneously, his dirty talk punctuated with breathless moans. Jesus, he sounds like he’s not even fucking _breathing_ , all caught up in being fucked, and it’s so unbearably hot.

Matt comes first, of course he does, his neck arched so far back that Ryan can see his eyebrows lift and his lips open before he hears the moans or feels cum on the hand that’s on Matt’s cock. He clenches his ass around Ryan as he does and Ryan’s arms almost give way - he’s so close, so tantalisingly fucking close, but he guides Matt through his orgasm, lets him clutch onto Ryan's arm like he might die if he lets go.

_He’s waited 5 years for this, what difference does 15 seconds make?_

Once he feels Matt relax, he tentatively starts moving again, lets Matt spread himself a little wider, and Ryan goes hot all over as he lets himself fuck into Matt as fast as he can, hoping it'll shut his brain up for just a moment. Matt’s overstimulation begins: tilting his head to gasp nonsense directly and deliberately into Ryan’s ear because - because bless him, Matt thinks he needs to actually _work_ to get Ryan to enjoy this, like it’s not everything Ryan’s been dreaming of for too many years of his life.

He comes. It’s heaven, he decides, right here, his forehead pressed against Matt’s sweaty shoulder.

* * *

It would be easier if Matt just climbed out of his bed when they were finished. A mindless transaction of sorts would be what Ryan could at least pretend to be partaking in. A transaction of...orgasms?

Whatever. It’d be easier.

But instead, Matt rolls over and just fucking looks at him. His blurry gaze pierces Ryan, with those stupidly gorgeous blue eyes, and it makes him want to roll up into a ball and cease existence.

“That was good.” He whispers simply, his breath ghosting over Ryan’s lips, and it’s like Ryan’s entire mouth has been sewn shut. It’s too much, the way the streetlight streams in through the curtain and bounces off of Matt’s pale skin. He clears his throat to burst the seams.

“Yeah.”

Matt raises a brow. “Was it not good for you?”

Ryan rolls his eyes, but there’s no exasperation there. Not visibly, anyway.

“Of course it was.” _It was incredible, breathtaking, heart-stopping. I loved it, Matt._

_I love you._

Matt doesn’t hear his internal confessions, despite how deafeningly they scream. “You’re good at sex. You know that?”

Ryan exhales in an almost-laugh. “Thanks. You’re alright. Had better.”

_Lies._

“Wow.” Matt grins, completely unaffected.

“Sorry, dude. It’s true.”

_It’s not._

Matt’s stopped responding to his bait but he’s still smiling at him, head on the pillow, eyes lidded in the hazy afterglow of a good fuck (hey, they’re Matt’s own words). Ryan’s chest aches. He can’t do this. He can’t just lie in bed with Matt and let himself pretend that this could actually become their new normal, let himself think that he could just slip his hand into Matt’s right this second and that it wouldn’t have catastrophic consequences on both of their lives.

He has to do _anything_ other than lie in this bed and let his heart disintegrate with each second that passes without Matt saying ‘I love you’ back.

He blinks. “I’m gonna grab a shower. Do you wanna go first?”

Ryan could have sworn there was a flicker of a change, something like disappointment in Matt’s gaze. _Stop._

“Nah, you go, it’s fine.”

“Alright.” Ryan’s legs don’t move. Can’t move. Matt’s cryptic gaze has him on lockdown.

_Stop._

He forces himself to look away, tries to ignore what he knows is Matt’s eyes continuing to bore into his back as he gets out of the bed. It’s agony. 

_Stop getting your fucking hopes up._


	2. called off the circus, burned the disco down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s silent in the room, and not in a comfortable way. Then again, Ryan has never been the one out of the two of them brave enough to break awkward silences.

Ryan passes through his living room on the way to the bathroom, unable to pass by furniture without throwing his arm out to gauge it in the space beside him. He doesn’t know what ungodly hour of the morning it is, but he knows it must be somewhere in that stretch of time simultaneously too late and too early for Matt to be awake, since he can see Matt passed out on his couch, phone on the floor next to his outstretched hand.

They don’t share a bed anymore, when one of them stays the night at the other’s apartment. It didn’t really come about from any particular objection from either of them; they just stopped sleeping together, which meant that catching the other one dreaming suddenly felt forbidden, too. Even now, just watching the way the TV flickers light across Matt’s still, slack features feels so voyeuristic, so nostalgic that it makes Ryan’s stomach turn.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing there just watching Matt sleep, but he can move his legs again now, thankfully. So he turns his head to put Matt out of his range of vision, and attempts weakly to put him out of his mind. Stumbling the rest of the way to the bathroom seems to take an eternity.

It only dawns on him when he shuts the door and turns the light on that he doesn’t actually need to pee. Something in him just felt restless, like he had been kicking covers around and disturbing Lego for one too many hours and he just had to do _something_ other than stare up at the ceiling or scroll mindlessly through Reddit. The light from the new bulbs Matt helped him install earlier that day (sometimes it pays to have a tall friend) reflects harshly off of the mirror, but Ryan is thankful - he doesn’t think he can stomach looking at himself right now.

Walking cautiously to the edge of the bath (as if doing so would somehow wake Matt, when his bull-in-a-china-shop parade through the actual room he was sleeping in hadn’t even so much as stirred him), he takes a seat, unsure of what to do in this change of location, unsure how to stop his mind. At least in here, he supposes, he can’t lie in bed with his eyes shut and think about the way Matt’s arm felt wrapped lazily around his waist, the way that Matt’s slow breathing would create a new parting in his hair as his head lay slightly atop of Ryan’s on the pillow. It doesn’t normally tend to make him feel as guilty as it has done tonight, but he doesn’t normally have Matt sleeping under the same roof while he does it, he supposes.

Lost in this contradiction of thinking about Matt in order not to think about him, he barely notices the knock at the bathroom door until it's accompanied by a voice.

“Ry?”

The nickname makes his heart hurt. The one Matt keeps off-camera, out of their wider friendship circles. The one just for the two of them.

“Won’t be long.” Ryan wills his eyes not to sting. Not now.

“You okay?”

“No, taking a monster shit. Leave me alone.”

“Liar. I know what you sound like taking a monster shit, you’re nowhere near this calm.”

Ryan hates that that’s true, but not enough to stop a giggle from escaping.

“Light’s been on in there for 15 minutes. You wanna talk?”

_No. Not with you. Not about this._

“Sure. It’s unlocked.”

The handle moves, and suddenly Matt’s in the room, towering over him with sleepy eyes that are shielded slightly by the soft, unkempt hair that falls over them. It makes Ryan wish he hadn’t sat down.

“Morning.” Ryan mumbles, voice dryer than he recalled five seconds ago. Matt just smiles.

“Does it count as morning yet if you haven’t slept?”

“How do you know I haven’t--”

“You look like shit when you haven’t slept.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. “Thanks. Really what I wanted to hear when I’m all...in my feelings and shit.”

Matt’s face drops slightly, and though Ryan was half-joking, it’s still nice to watch Matt squirm for a bit. “No, I mean-- like, ‘looking like shit’ is a relative term. Because when you ‘look like shit’, you still look...nevermind.”

It’s silent in the room, and not in a comfortable way. Then again, Ryan has never been the one out of the two of them brave enough to break awkward silences.

Matt crosses the bathroom to sit next to Ryan where he’s perched on the tub, and Ryan is half relieved, half annoyed by it.

“Are you mad at me?”

It’s so blunt, so immediately vulnerable in a way that Ryan doesn’t have the capacity to reciprocate right now. It’s so Matt.

“What would I have to be mad at you over?”

They’re sat so close that he can feel Matt shrug beside him, feel the way his pajama shirt sleeves brush up and down Ryan’s bare shoulders in his old black tank top. “You tell me.”

_Where on earth could I even start?_

“Matt, I’m not mad at you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Ryan sighs, leaning forward to put his head in his hands. “What would I have to gain from lying about this? I’m not mad at you. Not everything in my head revolves around you.”

An utter lie, and an unnecessary one at that, but it throws Matt off for a few seconds, which buys Ryan some time to pull himself together. He finds himself doing this often, nowadays, trying to convince himself more than Matt that he’s letting less of his time and energy be consumed by thoughts of him. 

“I’m not saying you’re lying.” His tone is gentler, and Ryan feels like the biggest dick in the world for being so horrible to someone who only woke up 20 minutes ago ( _One of many reasons you don’t deserve him_ ). “I’m just saying, the only reason I can come up with for why we haven’t talked about what’s on your mind lately is because it’s about me. Or because you feel like you can’t tell me. Which isn’t like us, you know?”

Ryan presses his head down into the palms of his hands until there are colours behind his eyes in an attempt to see anything but the way Matt looked three months ago, the last time they shared a bed, with a smile that gave Ryan the kind of happiness he could feel in his fingertips and his toes.

It’s quiet again, and Ryan realises Matt is waiting for him to give some sort of explanation. He was so busy fighting with himself that he’d forgotten this was an external interrogation too.

“I’m just…” Ryan starts, unable to go any further. He sighs again and finally lifts his head, turns to face Matt head-on, ready to rip the bandaid off and watch the way it makes Matt flinch.

“Things are different now. Between us. You can’t deny it, Matt.”

“They don’t have to be.” He retorts, without missing a beat. _God, has Matt been playing out this conversation in his own head for months, too?_

“I can’t really see a way they can go back. Not after...everything.”  
_Not after I got a glimpse of what my life would be like if I was with you, even if it was behind a closed bedroom door with the lights out._

“I would like them to. I miss you.” Matt’s voice waivers, and it’s too difficult, then, to stop the tears from prickling in Ryan’s eyes. He has to stand up, has to at least stand by the door, even if he knows that leaving the room now means that he’s lost Matt for a long time, if not forever. He can hear Matt’s heightened breathing as though he were still sitting right beside him, but Matt refuses to say any more, refuses to extend the olive branch any further than he already has.

“So what am I supposed to do, Matt? Just go back to fucking you? Go back to us having a weird affair that no one else can know about?”

He turns back and Matt’s face is hot, and he feels his heart shatter into a million pieces.

“You’re acting like it was my decision for things to be private. Or for us to stop.”

They’re so fucking close to Ryan’s breaking point, to his biggest secret of six years spilling out of his trembling lips uncontrollably. “We had to stop.”

“Why?”

“ _Because_ , we just--” Ryan lowers his voice, aware that he doesn’t want a noise complaint while the two of them are either going to start throwing punches or sobbing at any moment. “Did you really think that we could carry on?”

“I wanted to. And as far as I could tell, you wanted to, too. Was that not enough?”

_It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t ever be enough, when I was selfish enough to want all of you._

“Ryan, if you didn’t want me anymore, you could’ve just said so. Would’ve made it easier.”

The words are spat across the room to him, and Ryan can’t believe that when he’s finally being accused outright of something, it couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Of course it’s not that I didn’t fucking want you anymore.”

“Then what was it?!”

There are tears openly streaming down both of their faces now. This was exactly what Ryan was afraid of. The air around him feels like it’s on fire, Matt’s intense, unmoving stare the match.

“I ruined everything.”  
It feels like the wind has been knocked right out of him. Even Matt, renowned for being able to Talk For America, is lost for words.

Ryan lets his back slide down the wall behind him until he’s sat opposite Matt, and Matt thankfully has the decency to keep his distance this time. He looks at Ryan with something between curiosity and confusion on his face for a long time before he opens his mouth again.

“No, you didn’t.”

Ryan feels a fresh wave of tears coming. “Matt, you don’t understand.”

“Then help me to understand.”

Ryan thinks he would rather bash his skull against the sink next to him, but he does his best.

“I already lost my best friend once.”

Matt’s eyes soften in that way they always do when Daniel comes up. For the first time, his sympathetic-but-not-patronising look is making things worse rather than better.

“I don’t know how I would cope if I lost another one.” Is all he can choke out. It feels like The Confession, even though he knows that what he just said is something Matt already knows.

“You haven’t lost me.” Matt slides off of the side of the tub and sits on the floor in front of it, eye level with Ryan.

_I lost you the minute I agreed to get into your bed._

Ryan wipes roughly at his eyes with the back of his hands. He’s so frustrated, and so, so tired.

“I just wanted things to be simple. I wanted you as my best friend, just that. I didn’t wanna let my feelings get in the way of that.”

He thinks of all the times his insides would light up when Matt laughed uncontrollably at one of his jokes. The sheer, unrivaled bliss of walking with him to 7/11 at 3am, talking about the expansion of the universe on the way there and about which Mario brother would win a fight to the death on the way back. The utter confidence that knowing Matt put in him, and the lengths that Matt would go to ensuring Ryan didn’t let himself retreat into self-hatred and a life of shutting himself off from people who cared about him.

How he knew, from the moment he realised he felt things for Matt beyond all of that, he would smother all of it to keep hold of the best person in his life.

“You still have me.” Matt says, and Ryan looks up to retort back that Matt’s being a fucking _idiot_ if he hasn’t worked it out by now, but something has shifted in Matt’s gaze. Something about the intensity behind his eyes is trying to communicate...something

“I don’t--”

“Ryan.”

It feels like time itself has stopped as Matt shuffles forward on his hands and knees.

“You’re _always_ gonna have me.”

Ryan is too afraid to move even an inch, but he lets Matt lean forward and press a kiss to his lips.

It’s the type of kiss Ryan wouldn’t let himself indulge in back when they used to do it - if a kiss was becoming too gentle, too meaningful, Ryan would start biting and pulling at Matt until it veered back into sexual territory. Something was absolutely terrifying about the thought of kissing Matt like he was right now, like he would accidentally let slip the sheer volume of his love for Matt through a slow drip of affection like this.

He waits for Matt to pull away, too, scared that that will be it, that’s his one and only experience of getting to kiss Matt like he wants to, like he’s wanted to for months and years. He can’t even bare to open his eyes until he feels Matt’s thumb brushing against his cheek.

“You…” Ryan’s not great with words at the best of times, but this truly is all he can say as he watches Matt’s grin growing, knowing that Matt is watching the realisation dawn on his own face. 

“Me.” Matt responds simply, leaning back in. “And you. It doesn’t have to change, Ryan. It never did. You think I did all that with you and I didn’t love you back?”

 _Love you back._ The words wash over Ryan and he wants to cry again, from relief or happiness or just from lack of sleep. He’s barely willing to believe it, even as Matt kisses him again.

He decides he won’t stop kissing Matt until he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so folklore came out and made me 1. cry 2. want to finish this fic. expect more folklore-inspired fics in the future!
> 
> title of the chapter is from mirrorball by taylor swift

**Author's Note:**

> title/general inspo is from cruel summer by taylor swift
> 
> this is one of many fics that has been sitting half-finished in my google docs for literal years. im trying to work my way through the ones that are salvageable during lockdown! i hope u enjoyed, i kind of have more ideas for it so this might become multi-chapter?? maybe??
> 
> if you would like to support me, my ko-fi is: ko-fi.com/ao3matt !!


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